The paper introduces Spaced Repetition Training (SRT), a continual learning framework that schedules sample rehearsal using the SM-2 algorithm. SRT tracks per-example review states and maps perplexity to recall quality, allowing the training loop to decide which examples to replay and when. Experiments on Wikipedia and code corpora show that SRT improves the stability‑plasticity trade‑off, recovers 5–37 percentage points of lost old‑knowledge accuracy, and preserves benchmark performance better than naive continual pre‑training or uniform replay.
By Alankar Atreya, Devesh Batra, Yoages Kumar Mantri, Geremy Bantug, Greig A Cowan, Raad Khraishi
arXiv:2607. 15587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning studies how deployed language models can continually acquire new tasks without expensive retraining from scratch.
By Yang Meng, Zhenya Liu, Zhuokai Zhao, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2607. 04969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The training paradigm of large language models has shifted from traditional one-pass training to multi-epoch training, as reasonable reuse of limited high-quality data can improve both model performance and sample efficiency.
By Jingwei Zuo, Cong Zeng, Ilyas Chahed, Maksim Velikanov, Dhia Eddine Rhaiem, Pasquale Balsebre, Abhay Kumar, Younes Belkada, Hakim Hacid
arXiv:2609.40089v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continued pretraining enables language models to adapt to new domains and knowledge, but often at the cost of forgetting previously acquired capabiliti...
By Lukas Thede, Shengzhuang Chen, Stefan Winzeck, Matthias Bethge, Zeynep Akata, Jonathan Richard Schwarz
arXiv:2607. 02020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models must continually adapt to evolving tasks and domains, yet standard continual learning metrics mainly measure whether old answers remain correct, leaving the stability of multimodal grounding largely unexamined.
By Qianyu Chen, Canran Xiao, Runxuan Tang
arXiv:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.
By Hongyang Chen, Zhongwu Sun, Hongfei Ye, Kunchi Li, Xuemin Lin
arXiv:2607. 22556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) is essential for small language models (SLMs) to adapt to evolving real-world needs in resource-constrained deployments.
By Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Xintao Wu, Zhong Chen, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen
The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.
By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv:2609.06986v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language models may need to internalize information that arrives over time and retain it through many subsequent updates. To study this challenge, we i...
By Zheyuan Zhang, Alvin Zhang, Daniel Khashabi, Tianmin Shu
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
By Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai
arXiv:2603. 11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks.
By Abdulaziz Alyahya, Abdallah Al Siyabi, Markus R. Ernst, Luke Yang, Levin Kuhlmann, Gideon Kowadlo
The paper argues that catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity alone cannot explain why naive sequential training underperforms offline joint training. It introduces data co-observation as a third factor, showing that observing training data together consistently improves performance across supervised and self-supervised settings. The study also reinterprets common continual learning methods, suggesting that memory replay’s success stems from restoring co-observation benefits rather than merely mitigating forgetting.
By Timm Hess, Abhishek Jha, Gido M. van de Ven, Tinne Tuytelaars